Lenore Hart, the Guardian...and World of Poe

Regarding that column in today's Guardian : Hart claims that I have “made a crusade of attacking anyone who writes about Poe.” No. I have read enough about Poe, and done enough research into his life to know that he has often been maligned by history. I try to correct misrepresentations and lies, and those are what I attack. I don’t think of myself as someone who attacks others for sport. (Incidentally, anyone reading this blog’s archives will notice that there are writers--both in fiction and nonfiction--that I’ve gratefully praised. It is particularly ironic that Hart would make this charge, as when I first heard of her book, I posted that I hoped I would like it, and at first--before I reread “Young Mrs. Poe”--I did like certain things about her novel, and said so.)

Hart also says, “if you know the sources…then you certainly might say, I and the previous author are both guilty of sticking to our sources.” You certainly might say anything you want, but the truth is that, as there is very little historical documentation about Virginia Poe, Cothburn O’Neal fabricated much of his book from whole cloth. As I have said before, he invented several incidents which were reproduced in Hart’s novel--incidents which do not appear in any “sources.” I am curious to know if Hart can produce any specific examples where I criticized her for merely “sticking to our sources.”

When Hart accuses me of posting text that was “altered, edited, and in some cases even transposed…to make it more closely resemble [O’Neal]” I take offense. Many of the words I copied don’t just resemble O’Neal’s, they’re identical. I, as well as the friend who helped me compile the quotations I used, want only to present an honest and unbiased case, not start a “crusade.” I have repeatedly urged everyone interested in this issue to read the two novels themselves, and come to their own conclusions. However, if Hart can give me any specific examples of where I erred in describing her book, I will instantly and humbly apologize. Unlike some writers, I am always ready to concede when I am in the wrong.

P.S. I'm reminded of yet another passage Poe wrote during his "Little Longfellow War":

“But to be serious; if Outis has his own private reasons for being disgusted with what he terms the ‘wholesale mangling of victims without rhyme or reason,’ there is not a man living, of common sense and common honesty, who has not better reason (if possible) to be disgusted with the insufferable cant and shameless misrepresentation practiced habitually by just such persons as Outis, with the view of decrying by sheer strength of lungs--of trampling down--of rioting down--of mobbing down any man with a soul that bids him come out from among the general corruption of our public press, and take his stand upon the open ground of rectitude and honor.”

“The Outises who practice this species of bullyism…are either the ‘victims without rhyme or reason who have been mangled by wholesale,’ or they are the relatives, or the relatives of the relatives of the ‘victims without rhyme or reason who have been mangled by wholesale.’ Their watchwords are ‘carping littleness,’ ‘envious malignity,’ and ‘personal abuse.’ Their low artifices are insinuated calumnies, and indefatigable whispers of regret, from post to pillar, that ‘Mr. So-and-So, or Mr. This-and-That will persist in rendering himself so dreadfully unpopular’--no one, in the meantime, being more thoroughly and painfully aware than these very Outises, that the unpopularity of the just critic who reasons his way, guiltless of dogmatism, is confined altogether within the limits of the influence of the victims without rhyme and reason who have been mangled by wholesale.”

–“Imitation--Plagiarism,” “Broadway Journal” March 29, 1845

The Tell-Tale Hart

Apologies to anyone getting bored by the fact that this blog seems to have morphed into “Plagiarism ‘R’ Us,” but I wanted to summarize the progress of “The Raven’s Bride”/”The Very Young Mrs. Poe” affair. (AKA The Case of the Purloined Novel.)

As the old-timers around this blog may remember, the whole mess started back in February 2011, when I read Lenore Hart’s newly-published novel, “The Raven’s Bride.” At first, I liked it well enough—particularly compared to the excruciatingly insulting drivel that is the average Poe novel—but as I read further, I realized parts of the book seemed oddly reminiscent of another novel about Virginia Poe that I had read some years earlier, Cothburn O’Neal’s “The Very Young Mrs. Poe.” I exhumed my copy of O’Neal’s book, and the more I read, the more stunned I became. I realized I was looking at something very strange indeed. I shared my discovery at Goodreads and other book sites that were discussing Hart’s novel.

At this point, one of the weirdest developments in this very weird tale emerged. From out of nowhere, a group of newly-registered posters emerged at all these places, touting “Raven’s Bride” as the greatest thing to hit publishing since Gutenberg and attacking me as some sort of delusional crackpot for daring to say one word against this obvious masterpiece. These were obviously all personal friends of Hart’s, but seeing such hyperbolic enthusiasm being used in such an obviously unworthy cause was a bizarre experience. I had never before seen a third-rate scribbler with a claque.

These sycophantic trolls made the mistake of annoying me. Ironically, if they had only left me alone—or at least been a bit more civil—I probably would have let the matter drop. Instead, out of a sense of self-defense, I was compelled to write a blog post, “My Little Longfellow War,” where I detailed some of the more egregious “similarities” between the two books, just as proof that I was not making the whole thing up. (I later compiled more “similarities” here and here.)

My post was noticed by a couple of the book blogs, but this was not enough to bring the controversy to any sort of widespread attention. I wrote to St. Martin’s Press, Hart’s publisher, but they never replied. I admit that I was a bit puzzled by this apparent indifference to my discovery, as previous cases of plagiarism, such as the one involving the romance novelist Cassie Edwards, inspired immediate public outcry. However, not knowing what else to do, I just shrugged it off as part of the “ways of the world,” although I retained in the back of my mind a slight feeling of irritation that Hart had “gotten away with it”…and I also wondered how many other writers had pulled off the same stunt.

Then, the case of the plagiarized spy novel “Assassin of Secrets” hit the news, becoming a major scandal in the publishing industry. Just on a whim, I left comments at several online stories about “Assassin,” mentioning “Raven’s Bride” as an overlooked example of what was beginning to look like a plague of plagiarism.

Enter novelist Jeremy Duns. He had played a role in the “Assassin of Secrets” unmasking, and when he read my comments, he was sufficiently curious to look into the matter. He came across “My Little Longfellow War,” and thankfully for us all, he was inspired to put on his Superman cape and see that justice was finally done. As an established author, he had the credibility and influence that an unknown, eccentric, pseudonymous Poe blogger lacked.

He wrote about the matter on his own blog, as well as Twitter, giving his opinion that what Hart did was unquestionably literary thievery. He also contacted St. Martin’s, and spoke to others about Hart’s book, in the hope of finally making her actions publicly known. (There was also an utterly surreal confrontation with Hart on her Facebook page, where the lady demonstrated debating tactics that Orwell’s Ministry of Truth would have envied.) He’s become the hero of this sorry little story.

So…where do things stand, to date? Who knows? So far, St. Martin’s is ignoring Duns as completely as they ignored me. (I learned from Duns that at least one other person had also alerted the publishers about "Raven's Bride," to no avail.) Hart is still evidently hoping to continue to ride out the storm by attempting to befuddle us into ignoring the obvious. “Raven’s Bride” is still on the bookshelves, and I assume people are still buying it, unaware they are purchasing questionable goods. O’Neal’s novel is still under copyright, but unfortunately he died a few years ago. If he left any heirs to his literary estate, as far as I know they have yet to weigh in on the matter. “Vox populi” is our only hope of coming to any sort of resolution in this dispute. If you have read my posts on the issue, or if you have read these two novels for yourself, and agree that there is mischief afoot, all I can say is: Speak out. Spread the word. Let’s make ourselves so noisy and obnoxious (something that comes easily enough for yours truly) that St. Martin’s can no longer sweep the business under the rug. Without public exposure, I fear that cases like "The Raven's Bride" will become commonplace. (As an aside, for anyone who has the time and/or curiosity, Hart's previous novels might be worth investigating...)

If in the future I have any updates, I’ll add them to this post. In the meantime, we should all feel grateful to Jeremy Duns for taking the time from his own busy career to right what he sees as an obvious wrong. I’m sure that Edgar himself, wherever he is now, certainly does. The General of the original "Little Longfellow War” must be enjoying all this immensely.

Update 11/21: We've made the Guardian!

Update II: Archie Valparaiso compiled Hart's most egregious "similarities" to O'Neal's book into one document, including a few examples not included in my blog posts. (Thank you!)

Quote of the Day

“…if the theft had to be committed ‘in open day’ it would not be committed; if the thief ‘knew’ that everyone would cry him down, he would be too excessive a fool to make even a decent thief if he indulged his thieving propensities in any respect. But he thieves at night--in the dark--not in the open day (if he suspects it), and he does not know that he will be detected at all. Of the class of willful plagiarists nine out of ten are authors of established reputation, who plunder recondite, neglected, or forgotten books.”

-Edgar Allan Poe, "Imitation--Plagiarism," “Broadway Journal,” March 8, 1845

...Stay tuned.

The Return of The Raven's Bride!

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the bookstores...

Life is getting interesting.

The Joke of the Thing: Poe and George Lippard

On this date in 1849 the writer George Lippard, a strange, colorful purveyor of ultra-lurid melodrama, Gothic mysticism and eccentric social activism who probably deserves a blog all of his own, published in the Philadelphia “Quaker City” a characteristically iconoclastic eulogy of Edgar Allan Poe, a man he revered both personally and professionally. Unfortunately, Lippard's exotic, if undoubtedly heartfelt, recollections are virtually all we know of the friendship between two of the most unusual figures in American literature.

He described the last time he saw Poe, just a few months before the poet's death, when his friend was clearly feeling weary of the world. “We talked of the time we had first met, in his quiet home on Seventh Street, Philadelphia, when it was made happy by the presence of his wife--a pure and beautiful woman. He talked also of his last book ‘Eureka,’ well termed a ‘Prose Poem,’ and spoke much of projects for the future.”

Lippard described Poe as “a man of genius, hunted by the world, trampled upon by the men whom he had loaded with favors, and disappointed on every turn of life.” He went on to say, with a palpable snarl, “We frankly confess that, on this occasion, we cannot imitate a number of editors who have taken upon themselves to speak of Poe and his faults in a tone of condescending pity! That Poe had faults we do not deny…He was a harsh, a bitter and sometimes an unjust critic. But he was a man of genius--a man of high honor--a man of good heart…As an author his name will live, while three-fourths of the bastard critics and mongrel authors of the present day go down to nothingness and night. And the men who now spit upon his grave, by way of retaliation for some injury which they imagined they have received from Poe living, would do well to remember that it is only an idiot or a coward who strikes the cold forehead of a corpse.”

Almost exactly five years later, on October 21, 1854, the Boston publication “Dodge’s Literary Museum” printed another column Lippard wrote about Poe. Although, like his earlier reminiscences, he was ostensibly discussing only Poe's personal and professional travails, Lippard was a literary and political firebrand who had himself suffered battles with the establishment. (His brief, hectic life ended a few months before the publication of this article, when he was only thirty-one.) Lippard's writings about Poe show a clear identification with his struggles. He obviously intended more than a mere personal account of his friend--he wished to make a statement, to hold up Poe's sad last days as a cautionary tale showing the evil wrought by the current literary and social hierarchy. This being the case, it is possible that Lippard's descriptions of Poe were somewhat exaggerated, but they are nonetheless both interesting and moving.

Lippard's article is one of the stranger contemporary reminiscences of the late poet, never even directly mentioning him by name. It is a cryptic, dreamlike account of his encounter with Poe in Philadelphia during the summer of 1849.

He described his late friend as sick in mind and body, missing one shoe (an odd and unlikely detail that may be a coded reference of some sort,) and desperately in need of money. Lippard claimed he made the rounds of the city’s literary set on Poe's behalf, and finally managed to put together a small amount of money to enable his beleaguered companion to continue his journey. Lippard said he never forgot “that saddest of all sights--a great man whose genius had enriched publishers, begging his bread in Philadelphia, on a hot summer’s day.”

He continued, “One day, news came that the poet was dead. All at once the world found out his greatness. Literary hucksters who had lied about him, booksellers who had left him to starve, gentlemen of literature, who had seen him walk the hot streets of Philadelphia without food or shelter—these all opened their floodgates of eulogy, and slavered with panegyric the man whom living they would have seen die in the next ditch without one effort to save him.

This is the joke of the thing.”

Lippard concluded sardonically: "Great is the poet who is dead! Allah il Allah! Allah bismallah!”

In Memoriam

Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old--
This knight so bold--
And o'er his heart a shadow
Fell, as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow--
"Shadow," said he,
"Where can it be--
This land of Eldorado?"

"Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied,--
"If you seek for Eldorado!"

RIP, Edgar, wherever you are. Here's hoping you finally found your Eldorado.

I'm back...

...Temporarily, at least. And not here. Today I'm guest-posting over at that lethally interesting blog, Executed Today. I'm exploring a sordid little mystery from 1876: Was Mary Stanley's death the result of natural causes, criminal neglect...or murder? (And, yes, there is a Poe connection.)

Hope you like it.

Be That Word Our Sign of Parting...

This is just to say that I'll be taking a hiatus from this blog. (I'm suddenly picturing all of you responding to this statement by quoting to me the words of Oliver Cromwell: "You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately...Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!")

I had only one reason for starting World of Poe back in 2009--to leave "on the record" (even if it's in this obscure back alley of cyberspace) some sort of counterargument to the many errors, misconceptions, deliberate lies, and, here and there, (particularly on the Internet) sheer gibbering insanity that have hopelessly befuddled any efforts to truly understand Edgar Allan Poe.

Like so many others before me, I found it very difficult to reconcile the profound idealism and deep spiritual insight of Poe's writings with the degraded, almost buffoonish person found in his biographies. It is easy to imagine that a man can be a deeply flawed person and still be a talented writer. It is impossible to imagine that such an individual can be a wise writer. And Poe was not only a wise and enlightened writer indeed--one of the very wisest I have ever encountered--but an eminently sane, even compassionate one. ("Not only do I think it paradoxical to speak of a man of genius as personally ignoble, but I confidently maintain that the highest genius is but the loftiest moral nobility.") I realized that something had to be wrong somewhere. So I began examining his history more closely, and soon discovered that nearly everything was wrong. His "accepted" life story consisted largely of one bizarre falsehood after another. Rufus Griswold's memoir was not an anomaly. It was a template. (And, if you can imagine it, I have avoided writing here about some of the more appalling crimes that have been perpetrated against Poe, simply because I knew few would believe me.)

However eccentric or inept my rebuttals may have been, well, Edgar, at least I tried. I only hope I've done my "mite" (as George W. Eveleth would say) in aiding what I have come to think of as the Poe samizdat. Let me put it this way: If I've managed to persuade just one person to look at everything said or written about the man with a certain healthy skepticism, it will all have been worth it.

I suppose my admittedly odd crusade is all thanks to "Eureka." For many years, the work was generally regarded as the ravings of a madman or megalomaniac. In recent times, the focus has been almost exclusively on Poe's cosmology, reducing his book to a mere scientific essay. What both schools of thought have largely overlooked is that "Eureka" is, as Poe himself said, "a poem"--to my mind, one of the greatest ever written. It is difficult to pull individual quotes from this work--it must be read as a whole, really, or not read at all--but there are some particular passages that I have studied so often I practically have them memorized:

"...But now comes the period at which a conventional World-Reason awakens us from the truth of our dream. ­ Doubt, Surprise and Incomprehensibility arrive at the same moment. They say:--'You live and the time was when you lived not. You have been created. An Intelligence exists greater than your own; and it is only through this Intelligence you live at all.' These things we struggle to comprehend and cannot:--cannot, because these things, being untrue, are thus, of necessity, incomprehensible.

No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding, or believing, that anything exists greater than his own soul. The utter impossibility of any one’s soul feeling itself inferior to another; the intense, overwhelming dissatisfaction and rebellion at the thought;--these, with the omniprevalent aspirations at perfection, are but the spiritual, coincident with the material, struggles towards the original Unity--are, to my mind at least, a species of proof far surpassing what Man terms demonstration, that no one soul is inferior to another--that nothing is, or can be, superior to any one soul--that each soul is, in part, its own God--its own Creator:--in a word, that God--the material and spiritual God--now exists solely in the diffused Matter and Spirit of the Universe; and that the regathering of this diffused Matter and Spirit will be but the re-constitution of the purely Spiritual and Individual God.

In this view, and in this view alone, we comprehend the riddles of Divine Injustice--of Inexorable Fate. In this view alone the existence of Evil becomes intelligible; but in this view it becomes more--it becomes endurable. Our souls no longer rebel at a Sorrow which we ourselves have ­imposed upon ourselves, in furtherance of our own purposes--with a view--if even with a futile view--to the extension of our own Joy."

The close of "Eureka" contains the two finest lines he ever wrote:

"Think that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness--that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah. In the meantime bear in mind that all is Life--Life--Life within Life--the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine."

Strange, and to some, outrageous, though it may sound, "Eureka" has been a vital help and consolation in my long, painful struggles to make some sense of this "material and spiritual universe." For that reason alone, I will always feel love and gratitude towards Edgar Poe, and a corresponding desire to defend his name against all the dirty work--whether anyone in the world listens to me or not. I owe the man at least that much.

I hope to continue posting here from time to time, whenever I come across anything else in Poe "scholarship" that particularly annoys me. (Or if, God help us, Lenore Hart decides to lift from write another Poe novel.) I find abandoned blogs peculiarly depressing; it's like walking into a ghost town. For now, however, I'll "sling the knapsack for new fields," and focus my energies, such as they are, elsewhere.

So, as far as this space is concerned, I bid farewell--as cordially to foes as to friends.